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Friday The 13th Part 7: The New Blood
[Paramount]
1988; color
Directed by John Carl Buechler
Starring: Kane Hodder, Lar Park-Lincoln, Susan Jennifer Sullivan, Kevin Spirtas, Terry Kiser & Susan Blu
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Instead of subtitling this installment in the series "The New Blood," the team who wrote, directed and produced Part VII might have been better served by going the extra mile to get permission from Stephen King to call this one "Jason Vs. Carrie." Yes, it's a tale of "psychokinesis" run amok as an approximately teenaged girl gets tangled up with the original bad boy of Crystal Lake. The backstory here is that, many years ago, an elementary school aged Tina and her parents stayed at a cabin by the lake. Her parents got into a fight, resulting in Tina's drunk dad hitting her mom. Apparently this was not the first such incident, and Tina's reaction was to run out on the dock, jump in a boat and slowly float away. As her dad tried to coax her back to shore, she got uber-pissed and, through an explosion of psychic energy, destroyed the dock he was standing on, causing him to plummet to his death in the lake. I should backtrack a bit though cause before we even reach that point, we're treated to a nice re-telling of the legend of Jason Voorhees featuring brief clips from the previous six movies. For those of us who've been along for the whole ride, we already know Jason's chained to a rock at the bottom of the lake, but I guess the powers that be saw fit to recap things just so everyone would be on the same page. Anyhow, then we jump to the present day. A grown-up Tina and her mom arrive at the lake house to meet up with Dr. Cruz, a fella who's been treating Tina at a mental hospital for her "delusions." In reality, he knows Tina's both psychic and telekinetic - meaning not only can she see things that will happen in the future, she can also move objects with her mind. Oddly enough, these powers only seem to be active when she's under extreme emotional stress. Tina doesn't like Cruz, or his research / experiments but her mother seems convinced he can help her. After one particularly upsetting session, Tina goes down to the dock where she thinks about her dead daddy. Somehow her telekinetic energy takes a wrong turn and—presto-change-o—Jason awakens, breaks free of his chains and pops out of the water. Tina responds by fainting. When she wakes up, she tries to convince her mom and the doctor that a man came out of the lake. The doctor tries to dismiss it as another delusion but Tina knows better; of course, no one will listen to her. Meanwhile, there's a house full of horny twenty-somethings having a birthday party next door and sure enough, quicker than you can say Jasonjasonjason the blood is a-flowin' and the body count starts a-mountin'. The rest of the film has a lot of similarities to Part VI's storyline, only this time it's Tina instead of Tommy Jarvis who's trying to convince everyone that Jason's back. It all boils down to the inevitable showdown on the dock between Tina and Jason, where she finally sends the right psychic signal to make her father pop up out of the lake and take Jason back to his watery grave. At least until Part VIII. As an aside, one of the most notable things about this installment is Kane Hodder as Jason. He's the only actor who was hired repeatedly for the role (returning for parts VIII, IX and X) and for good reason; he owns the character like no one before him, employing an array of facial expressions that almost make it seem as if Jason is thinking, not just acting on impulse. While this isn't the best of the sequels, I'd rate it somewhere in the top half rather than the bottom.
—the Kommandant
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Cause Of
Jason's Re-Birth:
mis-directed telekinetic energy
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Setting:
Crystal Lake
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Body Count:
15
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Methods Of Death:
stabbing (4)
machete (2)
tree beating (1)
drowning (1)
sickle-ing (1)
neck snapping (1)
party favor in the head (1)
throw from 2nd story window (1)
tree trimmer (1)
ax (1)
misc (1)
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Cause Of
Jason's Death:
drowning
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